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Salesforce collects valuable customer data and helps teams track key sales activities and pipeline. But when it comes to reporting on critical SaaS metrics, teams often spend hours or even days building reports to address stakeholder and investor needs.
Salesforce is used across sales and marketing functions. To avoid adding a new tool to the tech stack, SaaS teams often attempt to use it for reporting. While Salesforce offers plenty of value, it often falls short when it comes to handling the specialized needs of SaaS teams:
With Grid, you can skip the manual work and instantly access accurate metrics and actionable insights into every aspect of your business to drive sustainable, profitable growth.
Salesforce offers high-level reporting capabilities, like Lead Conversion and Opportunity reports. Since the platform is embedded in your workflows, many SaaS teams use it for data analytics and reporting.
However, CRMs are not equipped to provide all the standardized metrics you need to make critical decisions and address investor questions about burn, runway, and unit economics. Here are four key limitations.
Salesforce can’t incorporate data from multiple data sources like Stripe or QuickBooks. It only tracks metrics directly tied to its own data collection, such as pipeline or growth metrics like ARR.
To calculate billing, efficiency, and retention metrics, you have to export data from your data source systems and crunch the numbers in a spreadsheet. This process is not only time-consuming but also increases the risk of data discrepancies.
Salesforce takes extensive manual work to provide detailed insights. For example, tracking a growth metric like MRR requires designing a custom object linked to your Accounts and Opportunities. Automated metric updates then demand orchestrating complex, rule-based workflows.
This operational burden only grows as you scale. As your teams expand, so do the number of custom growth and pipeline reports, and the metrics you track. Configuring objects, fields, and processes drives engineers and ops teams away from strategic projects, like analyzing data to identify opportunities for improving internal operations.
While Salesforce excels at collecting data, it lacks comprehensive segmentation capabilities. Salesforce reporting only shows you the current value of your data so tracking growth and retention over time isn’t natively possible. Instead, you need a separate spreadsheet to calculate time-series metrics, such as MRR over time derived from your Opportunity data.
While advanced data tools like Tableau and CRM Analytics offer flexible visualizations that can highlight some trends in your data, they require substantial financial and headcount investment for multiple software tools and your team still has to perform most of the analysis. As a result, you spend valuable time building complex dashboards from scratch, while your teams are stuck waiting to take action on initiatives.
Salesforce doesn’t generate comprehensive, real-time reports for metrics like retention and efficiency. Every time a department or stakeholder asks for an update or progress on a specific initiative, you have to manually consolidate data from multiple data sources.
However, by the time you export and analyze the data, it’s already outdated, leading to bottlenecks in decision-making and increasing the risk of errors.
Grid connects siloed information, automatically syncing and calculating the performance metrics you need to run your business. By auditing and analyzing your CRM, billing system, and ERP data, the platform provides a holistic view you can trust saving time and resources once spent on custom reporting.
As your business grows, Grid delivers complete financial and operational visibility, so you can optimize pricing, streamline workflows, and improve customer retention all for just a fraction of the cost of Salesforce’s reporting capabilities.
Here’s how:
Grid houses all your operational metrics in one place from revenue to retention to efficiency providing 360-degree visibility of your business performance. During onboarding, Grid works with your team to audit and map CRM, billing, and accounting data, ensuring a seamless transition and accurate metrics from the start. Integrating data sources like Salesforce, Stripe, QuickBooks, and CSVs enables you to build centralized dashboards with the platform’s 150+ SaaS metrics spanning Pipeline Value, Bookings, and NDR.
Drill down into any of these metrics to understand individual customer contributions, unlocking more refined product, pricing, and sales strategies. Since each metric is automatically calculated using standardized formulas, you and your investors get consistent, accurate reports at your fingertips as your data analytics needs evolve.
Take Vizion. The fast-growing logistics platform streamlined reporting workflows by integrating HubSpot and QuickBooks accounts with Grid, saving 15 hours every month.
With Grid, SaaS teams reclaim countless hours previously lost to data wrangling. By automatically calculating key metrics like ARR, MRR, and CAC, you can build custom retention, sales, and growth reports in just a few clicks. Customizable metrics support specific investor requirements and address shifting business priorities. The platform’s intuitive interface makes it easy for anyone from sales to finance to get the answers they need without specialized support.
Plus, Grid scales to meet your needs without extra headcount or team resources. As new information flows in, Grid automates data mapping and cleaning and flags inconsistencies across your sources, saving time on data reviews. Your dashboard is always up-to-date, saving your team hours every week and freeing time for strategic initiatives.
HRSoft is a prime example of how Grid automatically syncs new deals as they come in to provide accurate numbers, surfacing NDR, GDR, and Renewals insights in seconds.
Grid lets you slice and dice your data however your business needs it. The platform gives you full control over data segmentation with custom and computed attributes like sales stage, customer type, and product category, creating granular segments in minutes. With Grid, you can segment by custom attributes like sales stage or product type, identify customers at risk of churn, and confidently answer pressing investor questions about your CAC payback.
The best part? With secure, flexible access control, you can share intuitive dashboards while limiting access to sensitive data. Investors and other key stakeholders can navigate the data independently without risking changes to sensitive information.
For example, after unifying all their data in Grid, Hourly now provides board members with fast, standardized metrics with the precise visibility needed for accurate forecasting and capacity planning.
With Grid, your metrics are always up-to-date, automatically calculating raw numbers and turning them into accurate metrics. By syncing data from your CRM, billing system, and accounting tools, you get real-time, actionable insights into metrics like CAC, revenue, and NDR. Teams can take immediate action on insights, like reallocating marketing spend or connecting with at-risk accounts without manual data consolidation and calculations.
These capabilities adapt to support you as your data volume increases, providing reliable KPI reporting out-of-the-box to keep teams aligned on business initiatives without additional resources.
Look at Pearl. The industry-leading dental AI platform leverages Grid’s up-to-the-minute metrics to address investor questions about MRR, cutting 15 hours per week on RevOps reporting and increasing confidence with every report.
If wrangling data is slowing down your decision-making, Grid can help. Book a demo today and streamline your SaaS reporting.
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